


Right Now (It's Your Tomorrow)

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Psychics/Psionics, Bucky And Sam To The Rescue, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Coffee, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Hope, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kissing, M/M, Near Future, Pancakes, Peacekeepers, Protective Steve, Psychic Abilities, Psychic But Traumatized Bucky, Standard Winter Soldier Warnings, True Love, check warnings on chapter three, mention of brief past self-harm, nothing too awful but just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 20:03:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2360531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Psychic-but-traumatized Bucky, SHIELD peacekeeper Steve, pumpkin-spice lattes, knitted Captain America blankets, a mysterious mission, and True Love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Steve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Feanor_in_leather_pants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feanor_in_leather_pants/gifts).



> I'm going to say up front that I have no clue where this came from, nor what the plot actually is besides an excuse for hurt!psychic!Bucky and pumpkin-spice lattes. I THINK there are four chapters, but don't hold me to that.
> 
> There is FABULOUS art for chapter one by [feanorinleatherpants over here which you should check out.](http://feanorinleatherpants.tumblr.com/post/97953649230/some-ambitious-pencil-sketches-inspired-by-this)
> 
> Title from Van Halen’s “Right Now”, which I don’t hear often enough these days. (The alternate and working title was I'll Walk On Water (Every Chance I Get), from the Counting Crows song "Time And Time Again," but at the last minute I decided the overall tone of the song wasn't hopeful enough; and thank you to afrocurl (rozf) for putting up with me sending messages saying "name some eighties songs!")
> 
>  **Minor Warnings:** standard post-Winter-Soldier trauma, plus one mention of brief self-harm with broken glass, plus allusions to Bucky having once slept with an older man in the past to earn money (Steve doesn't know this), but all in the past at this point

_now_  
  
Steve’s cellphone goes off mid-meeting. It’s on vibrate, but he’s pretty sure everybody in the secret base of the day can hear it.  
  
Director Fury turns a coolly judgmental eye his direction. Natasha, despite sitting beside him, somehow manages to kick the back of his ankle. Clint looks at Steve with a hopeful expression, as if Steve’s personal baggage’s going to get them all out of the mission briefing sooner.  
  
Steve puts on his best innocent gosh-wow Captain America expression and under that a _leave it alone_ narrowing of eyes. His personal baggage isn’t any of their business.  
  
Except for how it kind of is. In the sense that it’s tried to kill most of the people in the room, or their grandparents, at one time or another.  
  
His phone buzzes again. He sneaks his hand into his pocket to cradle it protectively. Bucky likely hasn’t expected the meeting to go this long. No one’s fault.  
  
Well. Fury’s fault, if one wants to be accurate. This secret base is, yes, secret, and damn hard to find on time.  
  
The remnants of Nick Fury’s SHIELD Force eye Steve and shuffle their feet. They all know it’s Bucky, but no one’s going to say it. No dragging Steve’s other half and tragedy and epic romance out into public scrutiny, at least not now, at least not when it’s entirely possible that the scrutiny’ll end in blood.  
  
They’re under several feet of Washington D.C. and all sorts of technological blankets. It’s a hold-out bunker, a pitiful but courageous safe-house shred of what’d been the strongest psychic police enforcement agency ever in existence. The Seers and the Shields, which Steve has ever since recruitment considered a stupid nickname because technically they all work for SHIELD Force. Helping the helpless, protecting the innocent, catching criminals. Major criminals. The serious ones.  
  
Serious like the ones they’d failed to pick up, Alexander Pierce and Brock Rumlow and every other agent who’d insidiously been working to destabilize and conquer the world all along. They’re still reeling from the aftermath. Still trying to get back on track, to get back to protecting.  
  
The dim lights of the bunker flicker in sympathy. Compassionate. Steve has to consciously relax his fingers so as not to crush his phone. Bucky’s gone silent.  
  
Fury’s sending Natasha and her partner to Berlin. Something about Clint Seeing an assassination. Steve probably ought to be listening.  
  
Bucky’s at home at their apartment, while Natasha and Clint and certainly Fury tactfully pretend they don’t know of his existence. Steve, since getting pulled out of remorseless ice and into this shiny new century, has been working without a partner, without the eyes to his hands, without coordination. Officially, that is.  
  
Unofficially…that’s a different story.  
  
Oh, Bucky, he thinks, and tries to surreptitiously accomplish a glance at the screen. Can’t be urgent; Bucky would’ve called, or just shown up, the way he had once in Tahiti, spiky with weapons and sharp-edged conditioning, systematically dismantling three cyborg assassins who’d learned the safe house’s location.  
  
Fury dispatches Agent Coulson and his team to handle some sort of imminent man-made devastating earthquake in California. Scowls at Steve. “Am I boring you, Captain Rogers? I would hate to think the world’s only successful living super-soldier couldn’t sit through a briefing about currently active missions.”  
  
“I am ninety-five,” Steve crackles right back, “and you’re taking too long, sir.”  
  
“I apologize that the safety of the globe’s citizens assumes a higher priority than your need to speak to Sergeant Barnes every hour, Captain.”  
  
“I’m waiting for an order I can follow,” Steve retorts, and watches Fury get the intended double meaning. “Sir.” The old Bucky—the first of his Buckys, the long-legged irresistible boy who’d made the honor roll in school and dragged him to scientific expositions for fun and never gotten into any fights before meeting Steve—would’ve started laughing around now: _Goddammit, Stevie, you always gotta poke the volcano and see what explodes, don’t you…_  
  
Bucky would’ve grabbed his hand and outrun the explosion with him, grinning all the way.  
  
The Bucky of today barely smiles, and mostly because he knows Steve likes to see the expression. Sometimes he speaks Russian in his dreams.  
  
Fury holds his gaze for a few eternal uncomfortable seconds. “I’m sending you to be support for Black Widow and Hawkeye in Berlin. I fully expect to be informed that you’ve been an outstanding partner in the field, are we clear on that?”  
  
Steve nods. They’re clear. Crystal.  
  
“Get the fuck out of here,” Fury says, “I’ve got a World Council to irritate, and you’ve got civilians to save from disasters natural and unnatural. Standard check-in protocols, every twenty-four hours, use the backdoor Stark gave us, and nobody say StarkNet out loud or I’m gonna owe him twenty bucks, clear?”  
  
“You just did,” Natasha observes, popping bubble-gum.  
  
“I did not,” Fury says. “Go. Rogers, a word.”  
  
Steve sighs. Nat pats his shoulder sympathetically as she leaves. The lights flicker mournfully again.  
  
Fury crosses both arms. “How’s he doing, and don’t mistake this for me caring, because I am fully prepared to neutralize Sergeant Barnes the second he tries to murder anyone again.”  
  
“Better.” This is true. Not as if there’d been much possible in the way of _worse_. “He’s not a threat.”  
  
“Tell me that again without your bad liar face on and I might even believe you.”  
  
“I can handle it.”  
  
“ _You_ check in with me on the ’net every twelve hours,” Fury decides. “And if he comes up with anything reliable, sooner.”  
  
That’s fair. Steve would trust Bucky Barnes with not only his own life but with the lives of the world. Steve—and Fury, and SHIELD Force—can’t afford to trust the man Hydra’d warped and reprogrammed and renamed as the Winter Soldier. A slap in the face to Fury’s peacekeepers, that. Soldier, not police. Not a civilian.  
  
Steve and Bucky, of course, had once been soldiers. But Steve had never been a good soldier. Better off working as part of Fury’s quasi-official police corps. Protecting the innocent. Sometimes, ideally, hopefully, just before the crimes could happen. Close enough to have a reason to step in. Enough forewarning, foreSight, to prevent any harm.  
  
Steve had been a reckless, courageous, hurl-himself-into-the-fray kind of soldier. Bucky…  
  
Bucky. Well.  
  
Bucky Barnes had saved Steve’s life after the whole Hydra infiltration debacle. The Winter Soldier’d shot him in the gut and punched him in the face, and Bucky’d jumped into a river after Steve’s limp body and pulled him out and then vanished for three weeks, and _then_ had turned up at Steve’s door with too many ghosts behind his eyes and a tendency to throw knives when startled.  
  
Two months on, the ghosts don’t scream any less loudly, but sometimes they shut up for a while with Steve’s arms around Bucky’s shoulders.  
  
He’s never asked why Bucky saved him. Why Bucky came to him. He doesn’t need to ask how Bucky found him. He also knows how badly that vision must’ve hurt.  
  
Bucky isn’t a full-fledged member of SHIELD Force for a lot of reasons, technical-even-if-brainwashed treason and supposedly-deceased status high on the list, but another one that’s up there is: everything Bucky Sees burns black and red and scalding, now.  
  
Fury says, not unkindly, for probably the second time, “ _Dismissed,_ Rogers.” Steve jumps, tries to look like he’s not been lost in anguish, and goes.  
  
Out in the cool dark of the tunnel, breathing in recycled air, he checks the screen at last. The first message says _Bad dream_ , followed by _Eyes_ , because given ninety percent of Bucky’s dreams they need to be precise about this.  
  
Steve’s heart seizes up, mostly metaphorically and no less painful for that. Oh, Bucky. No words, just the oh.  
  
Two minutes after that, as if Bucky’s having to think about each letter: _Camp Lehigh. Mean anything to you?_  
  
Yes. Too much. Doesn’t mean anything to Bucky, obviously. Steve, phone plasticly chilly in his hand, can’t recall whether he’s ever mentioned the name of his training camp. If he has or hasn’t, Bucky doesn’t remember.  
  
He types back, _you ok until I get home?_ It’s a question with a definite time limit, a clearer-cut answer than the unlimited nebulous version.  
  
In the silence he can hear the shrug on the other end.  
  
 _Ok. Threw up all over your bathroom. Sorry._  
  
 _I don’t care._  
  
 _A face,_ Bucky tells him. _Knew that face. Tell you when you get here._  
  
 _5 min._  
  
 _Bring Starbucks._  
  
 _10 min. :-)_  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer this one, but Steve takes it as a win regardless. He pockets the phone—feels warmer in his hand somehow—and glances up to find Natasha standing there, eyebrows raised. “He okay?”  
  
“He’s fine,” Steve says, and they both know that’s a word floating uneasily over cracks and fissures and broken stone. “He wants Starbucks.”  
  
She sighs exaggeratedly. “You’d think the amount of caramel syrup I delivered to your door last week would’ve been enough. Where’re you going?”  
  
“Knew that was you. Berlin, Fury said.”  
  
“Fury said,” Natasha drawls lazily, and fixes him with pointed eyes. Clint appears out of nowhere and falls into step on her other side, absentmindedly matching their pace.  
  
Steve caves. “Not Berlin.”  
  
“Yep, Rogers, got that. We’ll handle it and come back you up, ’kay?”  
  
“Wait until I know what the situation’s like. He couldn’t tell me yet.” They’re walking uphill, out of the shadows of the bunker and eventually into sunlight. The sunbeams make rubies out of Natasha’s hair and flirt with the lines of his bike, parked behind her car under a no-touch force field, more spare StarkTech thrown their way. Steve spares a moment to ponder how he’s going to transport a venti pumpkin-spice latte on a motorcycle. Ah, well. He’ll figure it out.  
  
Light at the end of the tunnel. Not even a subtle metaphor. Maybe accurate, though. He hopes. He does hope.  
  
“Say hi for me,” Natasha says. She and Bucky have history, Steve knows. He’s not jealous—and it’s not even history like that; Bucky’d—the Winter Soldier’d—helped with a certain phase of her training, once upon a time. He nods.  
  
She and Clint hop into their car and go, speeding away across abandoned streets and back into the heart of the city. Steve looks at his bike, and thinks about Starbucks and Bucky asking him for something, and feels his mouth tug itself into a smile.  
  
By the time he gets home the afternoon’s folding gently into evening, sunset billowing out great streamers of fuchsia and gold. The lights’re on in the living room, which is a good sign. The television’s not, which isn’t. The quiet ushers him in, holding its breath.  
  
Bucky’s curled on the sofa staring at nothing, buried under a knitted Captain America-colored blanket sent by the grandmother of a boy Steve’d pulled out of New York City rubble. His hair’s caught on a blanket-corner and his face is pale and he looks far smaller than a deadly black-clad ex-assassin ever ought to, and Steve loves him helplessly hopelessly wholeheartedly.  
  
Ex-assassin. Ex-sniper. Ex-psychic. Ex-partner. So many shattered pieces. Steve could spend hours and days just gazing at him. Bucky’s alive.  
  
None of those _ex_ \- prefixes are in fact true negations. That’s what makes it all too complicated. The past is never just the past, and it twists around and cuts like a scythe through all the hope.  
  
Bucky’s awake, though, not checked out or shivering or holding broken glass—only once, only _once_ , thank whatever God’s still watching—to his own wrist. He sits up when Steve comes closer. “Starbucks?”  
  
“Oh, I see how it is.” Steve offers the cup, more or less unscathed by virtue of being in his own opinion cleverly tied to a hand-grip, and suggests, “You love me for my coffee-delivering services…”  
  
“I love you,” Bucky says, and stops to take a sip. That’s a message. Most words are, when they’re that hard. “For not yellin’ at me for interrupting your briefing. I cleaned the bathroom. Go change, and I’ll tell you. What I can, anyway. Lots of red.”  
  
Steve bites back inexplicable tears, nods, and flees. The scents of spice and pumpkins and caffeine chase him down the hall.  
  
He throws on sweatpants and a t-shirt—whatever Bucky Saw can’t be immediately happening, not if Bucky’s not sending him out tonight; that or Bucky needs him here, and either way Steve’s happy to hold him all night—and heads back out toward the living room. On the way, peeks into the bathroom. The mirror and floor and toilet sparkle back, freshly scrubbed to within an inch of their lives. Bucky didn’t just clean up after himself; he _scoured_.  
  
Steve gulps back the damn tears again, and makes himself straighten his shoulders. Captain America. Right.  
  
He sits down on the sofa where Bucky’s made space. Bucky looks up from attempting to drown himself in whipped cream and autumn decadence, wide blue eyes and messy hair and sharp cheekbones. Steve’s fingers ache to sketch him, to capture this version of him, beautiful like sheer cliff faces and wind-carved stone. To add the drawing to the rest, every facet of Bucky he’s ever known and loved and fallen for over and over anew. Every story.  
  
Bucky’d been the best of them. The stories, the ones that most people know, tend to claim that’s Steve. That isn’t so. Never has been. Least not the way Steve sees it, and Captain America can’t be wrong.  
  
Steve’s the hands and the heart and the tactical brain. But Bucky’s _his_ heart. Always has been. Always will be.  
  
Not to mention the Sight. Bucky’d been the one picking their missions, then; Steve’d done the active planning and led the execution, but Bucky’d chosen this base or that one, the left approach over the right. Unerringly, sniper’s eye combined with newly unlocked psychic abilities.  
  
Steve had never known, and then there’d been a capture and a lab and a secret he’d never heard, even when he’d thought he’d heard all of Bucky’s secrets. Bucky’d known his.  
  
These days Bucky can’t See without screaming. Too much red. Black. Jumbled images. Fractured mirrors of possibility. Whatever Hydra did to him—and Steve’s sure he hasn’t learned the half of it—they’d wanted their best asset to follow the possibilities that gave them the world. Anything else—a collapsing building, a child’s life—had been deemed a distraction.  
  
Distractions had to be eliminated. Burned out, if possible, at the root.  
  
Bucky runs his hand—his flesh-and-blood hand—through his hair, raking it back from his face. He’s got even more lean muscle and tension than Steve remembers from the war, a half-starved half-tamed wild panther-kitten poised to run. He nevertheless looks into the depths of his impractical holiday coffee for a while and says, “Also a lot of green,” and Steve’s heart sinks to his stomach and bobs back up, buoyed by grief and love.  
  
“Green what?”  
  
“Light. I don’t know…like computers. Old ones. Screens. And yeah, red…but I think that’s blood…underground…I couldn’t focus. The beginning was easier, but I think you were there to stop it and I think when I knew that it started hurting…do you remember a man? A doctor?”  
  
Through a mouth suddenly full of dry cotton, Steve forces out, “…Zola?”  
  
  
 _then_  
  
Steve’s sitting on the side of the medical cot and Bucky’s not looking at him. Steve’s been sitting there for close to twenty minutes. Bucky’s been watching the air drift around the tent-roof for just as long. There’s blood in his hair because they’ve bandaged him up but not washed the evidence away. Nothing’s washing the revelation away.  
  
Steve can’t say nothing any longer. “How’re you—”  
  
“Fuckin’ fine,” Bucky says without changing expression. “C’mon, Steve, I’m always fine.”  
  
“Yeah…you are…half the guys we got out, um, they’re right outside. I think you’ve got a personal protective detail.”  
  
“Tell ’em thanks.”  
  
“Tell them yourself,” Steve says, “not your messenger boy, seriously, could you _be_ more of a jerk,” and Bucky cracks a smile, thin as perilous ice. “Punk. Only you’d still say jerk when you mean asshole. We’re in the Army, for fuck’s sake, Steve.”  
  
“They followed you,” Steve says. “Dum Dum, Morita, the rest. They put up with me ’cause I came for you, but they hero-worship you, Buck.” He doesn’t say that he’s overheard and been told the stories. Bucky stepping in between the fists of their captor’s thugs and fellow prisoners. Bucky on a battlefield shouting encouragement through the thunder of guns and terror. Bucky as the sergeant every guy wanted to follow because he’d care if you made it home. Bucky letting the crazed mad scientist Doctor Zola take him away because if he said yes without a struggle one of the injured seventeen-year-old privates would get medical care.  
  
Bucky doesn’t say anything, only rolls his head to the side across the flat hospital-issue pillow. Steve gets the message. It throbs like a kick to the gut, but he changes the subject. “Want me to grab you another blanket?” He’s noticed the shivering. “Coffee?”  
  
“Still fine,” Bucky says, and Steve says, “Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you ever tell me, what the _fuck_ , Bucky,” and his voice is cracking like he’s ten years younger and a hundred times more broken. “Did anyone know?”  
  
“What do you want me to say?” Bucky flops an arm over his eyes, but after a second peeks out at Steve from underneath, and the weariness is the most honest he’s been since they’ve gotten back. “Hi, Steve, I’m a Seer except I’m not ’cause I only ever tested borderline? Not reliable? Except now I guess I fuckin’ am. How many times was that?”  
  
“Twelve,” Steve says. Twelve German encampments, minefields, troops out in the woods. Twelve times Bucky’d stopped their ragged mob of survivors mid-march and whispered information he couldn’t’ve possibly known. “You weren’t before?”  
  
“Yes and no. No. Yes. I don’t know.” Bucky puts the arm over his eyes again. “Fuck off, Stevie.”  
  
“Well,” Steve says, “think you’ve covered all the options, there, Buck,” and Bucky moves the arm to glare at him, although there’s not much force behind it. “And don’t call me Stevie.”  
  
“Yes sir, Captain America.” Bucky starts to say something else. Stops. Blinks. “She’s pretty, y’know. Your girl. And no, I said, not reliable. Good at small stupid shit. The corner store’s out of sugar, Ma, gotta go downtown. That pin Becca’s looking for’s behind the dresser. Never Saw the car when it mattered, you know? They had to pull me and Bec out of school and tell us we were ending up at an orphanage. Whatever he did to me opened it all up. Which hurts like hell, just so you know.”  
  
“Christ,” Steve says, stunned and numb. “Bucky—also, what girl, I don’t _have_ a—why didn’t you _tell_ me?”  
  
“One important thing I got right,” Bucky says distantly, “ever, and it had to be you. Skinny blond kid I Saw getting his teeth kicked in in a back alley after school. Knew you’d be there. Knew you’d come for me in that lab. Do me a favor and don’t get on any planes, okay?”  
  
(Later, when it is far too late, Steve will remember this moment and scream and cry and put his fist through a bulkhead as the cockpit hurtles toward the Arctic. Bucky _had_ tried to save him.)  
  
What he says, because he’s a colossal moron, is, “You knew I’d come?”  
  
“Always did See you better than anyone else.” Bucky’s voice is fading, exhausted. “Really fuckin’ tired, Steve.”  
  
Steve swallows against the lump in his throat. Reaches out and takes Bucky’s hand, and that’s not new between them but it feels new, this tremulous emotion they’ve never discussed beating butterfly wings beneath his breastbone. Stronger than ever, that butterfly. Survived war and torture and the weight of wordlessness, so far. “Rest. I’ll be here.”  
  
“Yeah, you will,” Bucky says. “You can’t win this war without me now. Too damn useful.” The edge of bitterness is just that, an edge; Bucky doesn’t mean to take it out on Steve, but he’s worn to pieces and they both know, sitting alone in the medical tent, that the Army can’t afford to let a genuine psychic have his deserved walking-wounded prisoner-of-war discharge. Bucky even comes with bonus sniper training and proven leadership capacity.  
  
They both know it doesn’t matter. Steve wouldn’t leave Bucky; Bucky won’t leave Steve. Bucky-and-Steve, always always.  
  
“You knew I’d be there,” Steve murmurs, kicking off his boots, sliding down onto the cot, wrapping arms around the other half of his soul. The cot’s not designed for two fully grown men, but Bucky puts arms around him in return, and they make it work. “In the alley, I mean. After school. But you didn’t have to step in. Could’ve got someone. Walked away.”  
  
“Sure,” Bucky says to his chest. He’s shaking, but that’s okay. Steve is too. “I hate trains, I think. I think I—you know I wouldn’t do any of it different, right? Then. Now. Whatever fights you get us into, I’m following you.”  
  
(Steve will remember this moment too. Steve will know then what Bucky knew already, and will very shortly thereafter fly a plane into the Arctic and quite possibly save the world for a while and do it all with Bucky’s face behind every heartbeat, fingers welcoming the cold because they’ve never been warm since the day they let Bucky fall from that train-car into that ravine.)  
  
All he can do in that moment is fold Bucky into his embrace and cling on as desperately as he can, bits of flotsam clutching at each other after the shipwreck. They’re not used to this new configuration of bodies and Steve feels oversized and puppy-clumsy and Bucky’s left leg’s splinted and the cot creaks alarmingly beneath them. But he holds on and so does Bucky and for that moment, in that moment, that’s enough.  
  
  
 _now_  
  
In the present the name hangs like doom in the air. Arnim Zola, here in their pillowy-sofa pumpkin-spice apartment. A man who should never be invited in. A specter. A vampire.  
  
Bucky shrugs, one-shouldered and forlorn as a tattered flag, and stares into his coffee like it might hold the secrets to ending the pain.  
  
“Okay,” Steve says, “okay, but he can’t be alive, that was way back—”  
  
“I am,” Bucky tells the latte. “He practiced on me.”  
  
Of course. Of course, in a world populated by aliens and psychics and Tony Stark’s global instant-communication holographic terribly-named StarkNet, of course.  
  
“I’ll find out,” Steve promises. “I’ll take care of it.”  
  
Bucky uncurls a foot from under the blanket. Nudges Steve’s thigh with his toes. “Not alone.”  
  
“Was that part of it?”  
  
“No. I don’t think—I don’t _know_.” With a frustrated grimace; with a twitch of that metal hand, such that the flimsy Starbucks cup dents inward, though it doesn’t break. Bucky swears in languages Steve doesn’t recognize and sets it on the coffee table. “I don’t think you ought to go alone, but I don’t know if it’s me Seeing that or just trying to keep you from getting yourself killed. I _hate_ this.”  
  
“I know.” Steve picks up the Starbucks and takes a sip. He’s not the biggest fan of pumpkin-spice. Worth it for the surprise in pale sapphire eyes. “I don’t.”  
  
“What,” Bucky says.  
  
“I hate pumpkins. I love you. I love that you’re here. That’s all that matters, Buck.”  
  
“ _How_ is that all that matters,” Bucky grumbles, but his lips’re inching into the approximation of a curve. “Give that back. You bought it for me. What the fuck’ve you got against pumpkins, Steve?”  
  
“ _Someone_ put one on his head and jumped out of a closet at me, about eighty years ago. Can I touch you?”  
  
“I don’t remember that,” Bucky whispers, and the cracks in Steve’s heart threaten to grow a tiny bit more, “but yeah. You can. ’s a good day.”  
  
A good day. So Steve offers arms and Bucky settles into them, practically in his lap, Steve’s hand drifting up to tangle in dark hair, blanket coiled encouragingly around both their bodies. The Bucky of back then always was a tactile person, easily affectionate, hands squeezing shoulders or patting men on the back or slipping down to cup Steve’s ass while conjuring dinner out of two potatoes and powdered milk; the Bucky of today—on a good day—loves being touched with tenderness and caressed and kissed but will never ever ask for contact. Steve’s entire body sizzles with rage when he thinks about potential reasons why, so he tries to not think too much and to instead simply accept each chance to give Bucky all the attention he’s been starved for, with no emotions allowed other than pure awestruck joy.  
  
“You could tell me that story,” Bucky murmurs, exhale like coffee and fall harvests and homecomings, sweet against Steve’s neck. Steve swallows against the onset of unreasoning hope, and tells that story, while the evening nestles in around them.


	2. Bucky

_ now _   
  
Steve’s either contentedly asleep or faking so well that even Bucky can’t tell. Bucky lies beside him in the onyx-silver oil-painting night and memorizes the fall of shadows over Steve’s chest, not touching, only following with his gaze.   
  
Steve’s smiling in his sleep. A hint of happiness settled down right there in his mouth. This, them sleeping beside each other, makes Steve happy, Bucky knows. His heart twinges, disobedient and wistful and feeling too much. Watching Steve sleep. Watching Steve smile.   
  
His head hurts like multiple kinds of hell, but he’s not going to bother to get up. For one, that _would_ awaken the super-soldier-sized softly-snoring lump in their bed. For another, he’s pretty much used to the hurt these days. Degrees of better or worse; never gone.   
  
Right now it’s better. Not the best it’s ever been—not with the memory of earlier sharper agony scratching away around the edges—but better.    
  
Steve will leave the painkillers on the kitchen counter the way he unerringly does before he himself leaves for a mission. Painkillers and fresh bright oranges and toffee or hazelnut or coconut syrup, whatever he’s brought home this time around for Bucky to pour recklessly into coffee, enough to drown utilitarian bitterness in the simple pleasure of too much flavor because he can.   
  
Bucky will appreciate the love and the coconut syrup and the citrus thoughtfulness. He may or may not take the painkillers; depends how bad it gets, how weak he is without Steve around. This is his life now; he’s got to learn to deal.   
  
He will not take—and Steve won’t leave out—the psychic suppressants. They’ve had one shouting match over this. Neither of them had exactly won.   
  
The nighttime light, smoke and ghosts and compassion, highlights Steve’s muscles, the curve of his waist, the line of his hip beneath a snowdrift of sheet. The dimness turns dark gold hair to paler gilt, antique portrait-frames kissed by time.   
  
Steve’s sleeping on his back, one arm thrown out for Bucky to cuddle into if he wants. He had. Still is, technically, caught between the solid furnace of Steve’s body and the firm commitment of the arm. It’s looped around his back, and his head’s on Steve’s shoulder.    
  
He wants to move, and doesn’t want to move. Restlessness crawls beneath his skin, the skittering spider-legs of old memories and other hands. But this is Steve and he knows this is Steve. And his body feels warm.   
  
The inertia and the warmth win out for the present. He doesn’t move. Lies there communing with the indigo shadows. They appreciate Steve together.   
  
Steve brought him Starbucks. Because he asked. He licks his lips, tasting phantom pumpkin and cinnamon in the dark.   
  
They’re not supposed to have the psychic suppressants at all. Those sorts of drugs’re highly regulated. Reserved for hospital use, for those patients who literally cannot cope, shrieking and smothered in visions and possible outcomes and the multiplicity of kaleidoscopic branching futures.    
  
Three days after he’d found Steve’s apartment and Steve himself, found the only thing he knew for sure that he wanted in the snarled glittery web of his head, he’d hit the floor airless and too dizzy to even scream. A robot army, of all the stupid fuckin’ things. In Manhattan. Metal and bolts and sunlight and fists swung into civilian faces, fear and terror and _death_ , and he’d felt Steve’s hands on his shoulders trying to hold him up, and he’d dribbled blood onto Steve’s kitchen tiles because he’d bitten his lip without noticing—   
  
Steve, scared as hell—and oh Steve scared is the ugliest sight Bucky’s ever seen, Steve with his infinite heart and endless courage gone white-faced and visibly holding himself together—hadn’t known what to do. Steve’d never witnessed a vision hurt that bad. Didn’t know what Hydra’d done to the Winter Soldier. The pieces they’d tried to carve out, the conditioning. All visions must serve the plan. All else extraneous. If the Asset cannot focus sufficiently, he will be corrected.   
  
Bucky’s not sure whether Steve asked or whether a friend—he’d guess Natasha, the Black Widow, with her eyes like the edge of a once-grasped memory—had brought over the tiny opaque illegal bottle unrequested. He’d been in no shape to argue.   
  
That’d come after.    
  
When he exhales, he imagines he can see his breath whisper over Steve’s bare skin. No marks, but he thinks there ought to be. Some sign of all the wounds he’s carved into Steve’s soul, inadvertently by his death and purposefully as the Winter Soldier and inadvertently a second time around by coming back wrong.   
  
Steve says it’s not like that. Steve says that those crimes are Hydra’s, not Bucky’s own. Steve says that the world got colored in again the second he knew Bucky was alive. Steve thinks that the rest is just details, not unimportant but _less_ important than the fact of a heartbeat.   
  
On good days Bucky believes him.   
  
The suppressants turn him into a vacant useless collection of bones and meat on Steve’s sofa. Left to his own devices, he might not even care, at least not if that was what Steve saw fit to do with him. Steve knows right and wrong better than he does, forever has—but he can’t.    
  
He’s always Seen Steve better than anyone else. On suppressants he might not See a single crucial final could-be-fatal moment. Simple. No amount of discussion’s budging that rock.   
  
Steve had looked at his eyes, had visibly wanted to beg and plead and take the pain away and carry it for him because that’s what Steve does. But this is Bucky’s pain, and Bucky’s choice. And Steve had in the end swallowed hard and said, “Okay, it’s your head, it’s your decision,” because Steve loves him.   
  
At least he’d made it to the bathroom earlier before throwing up everything in the universe. He doesn’t always.   
  
At least he’d been able to let Steve touch him. He can’t always.   
  
Steve’s other hand, the one not resting on Bucky’s waist, is lying flung out across the mattress. Paradoxical fingers, artist’s brilliance and soldier’s calluses; or maybe not a paradox at all. Steve is good at making things happen in so many ways. Creation. Action. Fighting for a kinder world.   
  
Bucky ends up smiling a bit wryly at the night. Steve Rogers. The hands to his eyes, the Shield for his Sight, his other half. Or they would’ve been, could’ve been. Except the timing’s never been right, _he’s_ never been right, and their whole partnership’s a messy patched-together limping affair.   
  
Steve’s had that lion’s heart inside his body from the start, even when that body couldn’t throw a punch without gasping for air. Bucky’d pulled him off the ground in a dingy alleyway and _known_ the way he’d never known anything else, one of those shocks of clairvoyant crystalline surety he’d heard about but never had, not until right that second, the second their hands met. Sparks in his head, under his skin: every last drop of psychic ability and intuition and physical attraction on top of that, all standing up and shouting _pay attention to this, this is your life, right here!_   
  
There’d never seemed to be much point to telling Steve. Not as if Bucky’s Sight was ever any kind of reliable; no reason to think this one was different, even though he knew it was. No way to explain.   
  
After Zola, in the war, he’d finally been useful, but that hadn’t been right either. Unnatural the other direction. Floodgates kicked open. Men following him on missions because he knew where to go, and glancing at him with apprehension back in camp. I’m not reading your minds, Bucky’d wanted to say, I don’t have that kind of control. He never said it. He wouldn’t’ve trusted him either.    
  
Steve’d gotten into a bar fight once in Paris because of glances like that. Bucky’d dragged him out and sworn up and down he’d punch Steve in the face himself if anything like that happened again. Steve had given him a wounded-puppy stare: Buck, I did it for you, you can’t tell me that’s right, what they’re sayin’—   
  
Steve, if awake, would probably tell him that being patched up means they’re still standing. He guesses maybe they are.   
  
On good days.   
  
Steve had joined Director Fury’s peacekeeping corps in this brave new world because it’d been the right thing to do. Steve is missing one crucial detail about the entire cop-and-psychic-partner dynamic, however, namely the fact that his own Seer’s too fucked-up to be of any consistent use. Back to familiar unreliability, though in a different way, and these days that comes with bonus puking his guts out in Steve’s toilet.   
  
Steve, who _is_ awake, says without opening his eyes, “I can hear you thinking, Buck.”   
  
“Sorry, Stevie, my passionate contemplation of pumpkins keeping you up?”   
  
“That’s disgusting. We’re never buying anything in the gourd family ever again. Vicodin, or should I just remind you that I _have_ a mission, one you sent me on, I’m going in the morning, so we’re working together just fine?”   
  
“I meant pie,” Bucky says, “I like pumpkin pie, c’mon, Steve, I’ll never be able to look gourds in the face now, I don’t even want to know what you’re comin’ up with. Captain America, wholesome as ever. We’re okay.” He even means it.   
  
Steve wriggles a little closer, surprisingly plaintive for such impressive bulk. Nudges a nose into Bucky’s hair. “You inspire me. Camp Lehigh, you said. And computers.”   
  
“Don’t need me for that. Yeah…something soon…not yet, but soon. At least one explosion. Probably.”   
  
“I can handle explosions.”   
  
“Take Sam,” Bucky says, listening to Steve’s heartbeat.   
  
“Um,” Steve says rather guiltily.   
  
“You called and asked him to check in on me, didn’t you?”   
  
“…maybe?”   
  
“Don’t go alone.” He moves his metal arm—the flesh-and-blood one’s trapped between them and slowly falling asleep—and lets fingertip sensors absorb Steve’s pulse, the steady thumping of blood, the temperature of sleep-flushed skin. “I’ll be good for a couple days without you, you know that, we’ve done it before. I feel less sick when I think about you being there without backup, so take Sam.” This is true. In the thorny thicket of what Hydra’s left of his Sight, black is white and good is bad and anything that might get Captain America killed is encouraged.   
  
Steve sighs. Loudly.   
  
“You know I’m right.”   
  
“Sam’s not you.”   
  
“No one else is me, dumbass. Take Sam.”   
  
“I’ll think about it.”   
  
That’s as much of a concession as he’s going to get at the moment. Bucky closes his eyes. Allows the thump of Steve’s pulse to overtake the thunder in his temples. Sam’s not him, but Sam does possess a touch of empathic gift, the same gift that’d previously made him outstanding at locating men in need of rescue and makes him such a good counselor for veterans now. Sam will pick up strong emotions, if not detailed scenarios.   
  
Steve and Sam together will most likely come back okay. And Bucky…   
  
…will wait at home.   
  
Steve’s home.    
  
Where he showed up one dreary graveyard-sky afternoon because he couldn’t stay away.   
  
He knows he loves Steve. He knows Steve loves him. With every atom of his broken heart, he knows.   
  
He just doesn’t know why.   
  
Steve’s hand kneads his back affectionately, soothing tense knots. “Cold?”   
  
  
_ then _   
  
He’s lying on his back. Everything hurts and nothing hurts. All kind of distant. Far-off. Like twinkling stars: scorching up close, of course, but pretty from a distance.    
  
He knows he’s lying in snow because for a while he’d felt wet and cold, but he’s not so much noticing now.   
  
He thinks he might be missing most of an arm. He hasn’t looked, but something feels different on that side. Weight distribution. Uneven. He’d’ve thought that at least might hurt, not that he particularly wants it to.   
  
He can see Steve’s face when he closes his eyes.   
  
I’m sorry, he wants to say. I know I didn’t tell you. I did tell you. Even before I completely knew, when all the images showed up and smacked me over the head and laughed, I told you I hate trains and I knew you wouldn’t know what I meant but I was saying I’m sorry. I was saying I’m choosing this with you instead of anything else without you. I love you.   
  
Should’ve told you that.    
  
Should’ve looked you in the eyes and said it, straight up: Steve Rogers, I love you.   
  
You’d’ve known if I had that something was wrong.   
  
He knows Steve will be grieving. He doesn’t know whether Steve will realize what Bucky had known. He hopes not. The weight’ll go right to Steve’s too-generous heart and crush it.   
  
He doesn’t know whether he’s going to die. He assumes so. In all the missions, all the visions, he’s never Seen anything for himself past this point. Only the train and the fall and the black.   
  
He’s Seen Steve once or twice, in the blurrily indistinct way that means those possible shapes haven’t settled into any degree of probability. Steve alive and jogging in some sort of near-future sunlit city, maybe D.C. from the glimpse of the White House, not that Bucky’s ever been. Steve in battle with a reptilian alien, which, maybe his brain’s finally imploded under the cacophony of unregulated revelations. Steve still and pale and ice-cold and unmoving.   
  
He’d tried to give the warning. Don’t get on any planes. Please. Not that Steve was ever any kind of good at staying safe.   
  
(Later he’ll hear a story about a training camp and a fake-live grenade and he’ll turn to look at Steve very very slowly and Steve will say, yeah, but—I couldn’t do anything _else_ , could I. And Bucky will love him, helplessly and angrily, more than ever.)   
  
He hopes Steve is succeeding at the mission. Hopes someone else, maybe Dum Dum or pretty Peggy, can step in and guard his back and hold him up through the inevitable collapse when the adrenaline wears off and the loss sets in.   
  
He is, selfishly, a little glad he never told Steve, because he might’ve never been able to go through with this with Steve begging him to stay off the train.   
  
He pretends, because there’s no harm in that—ha, no harm, no arm, and now his mind’s losing rationality in what’s not even a very good joke—that he gets to see Steve one more time, that Steve’s come to find him and knelt down and taken his good hand in both of those large ones. He pretends that he gets to tell big blue eyes “I love you,” the first and last time those words’ve hit the air, and he thinks that Steve says it back, love for love.   
  
Steve says something else. Something Bucky doesn’t understand. Russian? Steve doesn’t speak Russian. French, yeah, a bit of German, sure. Russian, no.   
  
He shoves his eyes into focusing. Steve’s skinny beloved shape flickers and fades. The voices don’t. Only get more excited, carrying over snow.   
  
Dark dots. The dark dots are people. They come closer and put hands on him. One of them smiles. Another one speaks into a communicator of some kind. Bucky, like Steve, does not speak Russian.   
  
(Later he will know Russian. He will know too many languages he can’t remember learning.)   
  
He catches a name. Zola.   
  
Oh, he thinks, I am going to die, just not the way I thought; and then the hands lift him and maneuver him and the numbness erupts into stabbing unendurable pain, and then he thinks nothing more.   
  
  
_ now _   
  
Steve’s rubbing his back and kissing his hair and asking whether he’s cold. This is not a question with a graspable answer, so Bucky just nods and permits Steve to bundle him up in fierce arms and thick woolen blankets. The arms feel awfully nice. So do the blankets. So does Steve.   
  
Eventually, to the cadence of Steve’s breathing, he sleeps.    
  
In the morning he gets up and makes eggs and bacon and pancakes, apple-cinnamon-walnut with butter _and_ syrup. He’s not any kind of gourmet cook, but he has stray recollections of having to learn on days when Steve’d been too sick to get out of bed, when someone had to try. Half-burned soups gradually becoming less so. Stale bread turned into pudding. The art of thinning milk out with water. Most of that’s less relevant in a world where Captain America’s got money and the Winter Soldier’d kept backup caches stashed away, but the skills’re transferable and the habit’s apparently permanent: himself cooking for Steve.   
  
Steve, half in uniform, gets lured out of the bedroom by the scent of breakfast, and devours fluffy cakes by the dozens. “Love you.”   
  
“Love you,” Bucky says back, and draws a happy face in syrup on the last one and drops it onto Steve’s plate. He doesn’t care one way or another about the process of cooking as such; doesn’t hate it, doesn’t find it fascinating. But Steve’s smile, Steve being well-fed, Steve being happy before missions—   
  
Those things he does care about. And that is a fact: Bucky Barnes will do whatever he can, anything he can, to take care of Steve. Including pancakes.   
  
Not banana bread, though. Today’s bananas are blasphemous. A travesty.   
  
Steve studies the pancake. “Are you?”   
  
“Are…you…befriending the breakfast food?”   
  
“You know what I mean. I called Sam, too.”   
  
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a terrible liar,” Bucky muses to his coffee. Raspberry mocha, this morning. Whipped cream and chilly autumn sunshine peeping through the kitchen window. “And yeah. Wouldn’t say it if I weren’t.”   
  
“You didn’t say it,” Steve says. “You drew it on a pancake. I’m just not good at lying to you, and that wasn’t lying. Misdirection. At best.”   
  
“Don’t try to misdirect your Eyes, then. Even if I am fifty kinds of fucked-over, I can still See you when you think I think you’re in the shower. You called Sam and told him to check on me anyway, because you’d rather him watch me than be your backup, which is really fuckin’ stupid, Steve.” He adds, well aware that he’s got whipped cream on his nose and no doubt looks ludicrous arguing, “And that _was_ me sayin’ it. Thought you were the artist; you’d figure it out.”   
  
“You have whipped cream on your nose.” Steve grins, astonishing and bright. “Leave it. Can I touch you?”   
  
“Ah…yes?”   
  
Steve gets up, comes around the table, puts both hands on Bucky’s face, leans in—and licks the tip of his nose. Bucky sits there blinking and confused and incredibly turned on, which is _not_ the appropriate reaction to Captain America _licking his face,_ unless it maybe is.   
  
Steve cares. That’s what it is.   
  
“Better,” Steve concludes, voice all smug and self-satisfied, and Bucky wants to kiss him because Steve looking so proud of himself is too damn adorable.    
  
He grumbles, “Could’ve just kissed me,” and Steve’s grin grows. Huh. Wouldn’t’ve thought that was possible, but there it is, giddy as the sunbeams. “Want me to?”   
  
“ _Yes_ , dammit!”   
  
“Such a mouth on you,” Steve murmurs, “I don’t know, Buck, think we might need to find better ways for you to express yourself,” and that frankly ridiculous line shouldn’t be as hot as it is, but then Steve’s mouth lands on his, syrup-sticky and sweet, and Bucky forgets how to talk for several blissful minutes.   
  
Steve pulls away with reluctance. “I should get dressed…”   
  
“You could get undressed,” Bucky tempts. There’s whipped cream in Steve’s hair now too. And their breakfast table really isn’t made to support two super-soldier bodies.    
  
“You said it wasn’t soon, but it was important.”   
  
“Yeah…I know…all right, go on.” He unwraps legs from Steve’s waist. “Sending Sam after you the second he shows up here.”   
  
“He won’t listen. About the shower, Buck, you’re always invited. And…”   
  
“I know.” Sometimes, once in a while, he can accept. Sometimes the memories sear and sizzle like the morning’s bacon. The spray of indifferent icy water. Being hosed down. Standing naked when told. His body following someone else’s orders. “And?”   
  
“And.” Steve touches his face, his cheek. The day’s crisp and full of dawn around them, and Bucky doesn’t for once feel like shivering. “What you said. Your Eyes, you said. To me. Mine.”   
  
“Oh—fuck, Steve, no, I just—I meant—I was just talking—”   
  
“I know. But you said it. You didn’t think about it.” Steve kisses him once more, grabs the happy-faced pancake, and through a bite finishes, “Me, too. Yours.”   
  
“No manners _at all,_ ” Bucky says, and plucks the last strip of bacon off the plate before Steve can eat that too. Steve regards this theft with some dismay, but mostly joy. “I’ll call if I pick up anything else. _Or_ if I feel worse, Steve, I know.”   
  
“Good,” Steve mutters, and goes off to pour himself into the Captain America uniform once more. When he comes back there’s a pile of more bacon, and Bucky watches him grin at that.    
  
“Steve.”   
  
“Yeah, Buck?”   
  
“I know you are. And I am. Yours.”   
  
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, “you are,” and swings himself onto his motorbike with his shield on his back, shining in red and blue earnestness under the open sky, and Bucky props a shoulder in the doorway and watches him leave.


	3. Bucky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible Warnings: contains potential--as in, Bucky seeing possible futures in a vision, but not real yet--major character death, and also allusions to Bucky in the past having once slept with an older man in order to earn money, all off-screen and non-specific.

_now_  
  
He does the dishes, after Steve departs.  
  
They have a dishwasher, but he doesn’t bother. He uses it when Steve’s around, sometimes. Sometimes not.  
  
The water’s hot and not frozen and that’s good. The air fills up with steam and soap and that’s good too. Pots and pans are solid graspable objects to his touch. They grow cleaner when he scrubs them. Finite chore with a visible tangible end.  
  
Steve’s eyes had gotten sad the first time Bucky’d tried to explain. He’d tried a second time, worried and afraid he hadn’t said the words right. About something dirty getting scoured clean. Evidence of use wiped away, ready for the next task. Steve hadn’t looked much happier at that.  
  
He’d given up, then. He knows Steve still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t have the vocabulary left to shape any more sense from the pieces. It’s about cleanliness, yeah. And about memory. Even if he washes the pot they’ve made spaghetti in, they’ll have the memory of tomato-slathered meatballs and garlic bread and Steve’s grin when Bucky got sauce on his nose. The rinsed shiny pot means that not all memories have to come with indelible scars.  
  
His head hurts, but not much.  
  
The breakfast pans and plates are dry and put away, and Steve hasn’t checked in, but it’s early to start fretting. It won’t be nothing, this mission—Bucky, in one of the world’s sickest cosmic ironies, is always right these days, and nobody’s laughing—but he hopes he’s caught it soon enough that whatever Hydra’s planning hasn’t kicked off just yet.  
  
He wanders into the living room and then stops because he doesn’t know why he’s in the living room.  
  
He glances around. The closed window-blinds and blank television screen and cozy sofa shrug back. No clue.  
  
He stands in front of the sofa for a while. He’s good at standing in places. Not moving. Staying still until ordered.  
  
The blanket from the previous night has remained on the sofa. It fluffs up in red-and-blue-and-white invitation. He knows it’ll feel warm.  
  
Steve has said he used to like to read. Pulp magazines, comics, flying cars, anything with the word _science_ in the title. You were, Steve’d said, smirking, pretty much a, I think these days you’d say geek, until me.  
  
Nope, Bucky’d said right back, not me, Stevie, _which_ one of us got kissed by Becky Connolly at the tender age of ten, again?  
  
Steve had laughed, more out of relief and joy than because the recovered memory itself was hilarious. Bucky hadn’t had the heart to tell him that Steve himself’d mentioned that story, two weeks before.  
  
He’s not sure he recalls how to read for pleasure. Delight in a scientific discovery. Pure indulging of curiosity. Steve had carefully showed him how to use the tablet—a StarkNet prototype—to pull up books and articles. Bucky’d said thank you, and once Steve’d left had promptly stared at the screen for an hour. Couldn’t think of anything he _wanted_ to look up. Couldn’t imagine information without a tactical use. Not real.  
  
The next time he looks at the clock he realizes that several hours’ve vanished.  
  
He blinks. There’s a noise. Shrill.  
  
The noise is not related to the blink, it turns out, because when he tests this theory—it’s not all that farfetched, considering the rest of him—it doesn’t correlate a second time. Huh.  
  
At this point his phone rings. It’s the ringtone Steve put in for Sam. Marvin Gaye, crooning passionately away.  
  
He picks it up. “What?”  
  
“Do you ever say hello like a normal person,” Sam says, “sheesh, seriously, and thank God, okay, because I’ve been leaning on your doorbell and I was startin’ to think you’d checked out on me, and that is not okay, first because I like you and second because I like me, and man, Steve would _kill_ me.”  
  
“Oh.” He adds, “Sorry,” because that’s what people do. When he opens the door, Sam’s got folded arms and two Starbucks cups and an exaggerated glower. Bucky sighs. Pulls himself back together, as many pieces as he can grab. “Come in?”  
  
“Damn right. Hazelnut macchiato?”  
  
“Thank you?” He trails Sam back to the sofa. Sam sits down, because that’s what people do with furniture. Bucky suppresses another sigh and sits down too.  
  
He likes Sam because Sam doesn’t need him to pretend. The problem is, of course, that Sam consequently knows how bad it is when he doesn’t.  
  
He says, “Why do you even need me to say hello,” and takes a sip of his coffee. It murmurs heat and dark-roast nutty flavor over his taste-buds. “Unnecessary words. You called me. I picked up.”  
  
“Unnecessary words my ass,” Sam says, and Bucky retorts, “Your ass is also unnecessary,” which makes Sam crack up. Bucky grins. Satisfactory result achieved. That…feels good.  
  
“My ass,” Sam grumbles, assuming a thoroughly fake injured expression, “is _entirely_ necessary. Learn to appreciate works of _art_ , man.”  
  
“I will when I see one.” He looks down at the featureless white lid. “I didn’t mean to. Scare you.”  
  
“No, I know, no worries, we’re cool.” Sam waves a hand. “Are you? Cool?”  
  
“I…” He stops.  
  
He is. He’s not in pain. He’s not on his knees or screaming or too sick to focus. In fact, he suspects that he is what an ordinary person might call fine.  
  
Even the headache from earlier’s departed.  
  
He can feel his face go white. Huh. He’d never known that was so literal.  
  
Sam sets down his cup. Leans in. “James? Bucky? Talk to me.”  
  
“I’m…okay…”  
  
“That’s good, right?”  
  
“No—no, you don’t understand, _nyet_ —” He’s on his feet. Shaking. “I have to—Steve—this is wrong, this is—Steve’s in trouble—”  
  
“Wait, wait, slow down.” Sam doesn’t grab his arm because they both know that’s a terrible idea, but does step in front of him. “You Saw something? Just now?”  
  
“No, I didn’t, but that’s why—” The room’s spinning. Steve’s in danger and somewhere Hydra’s gloating because the world’s going their way and there’s no threat, no need for the Winter Soldier to be Seeing anything that might suggest doubt on the eve of triumph or unsuccessful plans—  
  
“Sit down,” Sam says, “before you fall over. Breathe. Slow. In. Out. That’s it. One more. You can do it. One more.”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky whispers, breathing.  
  
“Okay.” Sam’s kneeling in front of him, having eased him gently to the floor. “Steve. What about Steve? Actual vision?”  
  
“No, I…the way it works, now…they’re happy about something, it’s going right…” He sees Sam figure it, then. Comprehension like a bullet. Like a heart-shot, straight and true.  
  
“We have to go,” he says. “We have to—Steve.”  
  
“We have to Steve,” Sam agrees, “right, okay. You sure you mean that _we_?”  
  
“Please.” The Winter Soldier doesn’t beg. Bucky Barnes does if it’ll get him to Steve. Bucky Barnes will do anything, wade through blood and break bones and hollow out his own heart and sell his soul and perjure himself before witnesses and kneel on their plush dark-blue rug and plead without shame, if any of that’ll keep Steve safe one second longer.  
  
He doesn’t get even that chance, though, because as he stumbles to his feet with Sam’s hand on his arm the universe implodes.  
  
Metaphorical. But true nonetheless, as his senses turn into flame.  
  
He hits the floor without the chance to scream. Images burn and scorch and race behind his eyelids, branded into his brain. Possible futures. Captain America in a bunker underground. Captain America throwing the shield, swinging—at what? Computer banks? Green-screened, green-skinned faces? A sizzle of electric energy—  
  
Himself and Sam, magically there, fighting at Steve’s side—  
  
Fire fire fire—  
  
Bodies, impending bodies, a stomach-twisting overlay of potentialities. Dead Steve dead Bucky dead Sam. No. No no no. Dead Steve again. _No_. Steve safe. Yes. Steve and Sam safe. Yes, please yes, how can he make _that_ one happen out of all the flickering windy glimpses—  
  
Natalia—Natasha, these days, Natasha—and her partner running through a door—  
  
Steve strapped down and hooked into a machine, with wires in his brain—  
  
 _No_.  
  
Bucky with wires in _his_ brain—  
  
Okay, he’ll take that one. If Steve’s alive.  
  
His mouth tastes like blood and vomit. Someone’s shouting. Far-off.  
  
He keeps his eyes shut. Tries to focus. Narrowing down, following threads that cut into his mental fingertips as he tries to gather them. They slice his hands his brain his next breath to ribbons.  
  
A crack of pain blooms across his cheek. External.  
  
He gasps, chokes on saliva and whatever he’s been throwing up—he’s absolutely off macchiatos for a while—and opens his eyes.  
  
Sam’s kneeling there with a hand raised, with that hand frozen in place because Bucky’s metal fingers’ve clamped around his wrist. They stare at each other for a minute.  
  
“Oh,” Bucky says weakly. “Sorry.”  
  
“Well, you didn’t break my arm, let’s call it a win.” Sam flexes his wrist. Winces. “Sit up for a minute? Look at me? Follow my finger?”  
  
Left to right; Bucky sighs, flinches—there’s a lingering halo effect around every object, associated echoes of past and future positions in time and space—but manages to track enough to call himself functional.  “ 'm fine.”  
  
“Nope. Here, I’m gonna get you water and clean you up—”  
  
“No time.” He’s wrestling down the need to be sick again. But the rug’s self-cleaning—another minor StarkTech miracle—and he wobbles to his feet. “I know what Zola wants from Steve. And I feel fuckin’ awful when I think about us there too—”  
  
“So we’re going. I got it.” Sam gets in under his arm, determined support. Bucky wants to protest. Can’t argue. Take the help when you need to, Steve had said, Sam had said. Not meant as an order, but it fits into his head better when he thinks of it that way. Something else Steve doesn’t quite understand but accepts.  
  
Steve’s always accepted him. Steve’s been his strength all along. From Brooklyn to the lab to the fall to a bridge and a battle and a shocked look in blue eyes. No matter what. To the end of the line, and they’ve been past that line, over it, under it, dead and alive and brought back and brought back wrong, and he doesn’t even know what that phrase means anymore, what line or where, a metaphor or real battle-lines pulled up in formation.  
  
It’s so stupid and all-encompassing that it can’t be anything other than true. Himself and Steve, to the end of the line. They’ll run headlong into it together.  
  
He yanks off his shirt. Grabs another one and as many weapons as he can cram into various hiding places and holsters. Throws a few Sam’s way.  
  
Sam catches knife and stun-gun and pistol easily. “Where’re we going?”  
  
“Camp Lehigh.”  
  
“What, Cap’s old training grounds?” Sam pauses to tap something into his wristwatch. It’s not only a watch, of course. “History not so much the in-the-past sort of history?”  
  
Bucky doesn’t pause, doesn’t show the teetering anyplace physical. Sam’d known that. He hadn’t. Had needed the reminder. Holes in his memory. Wispy clouds. Gaps like the way Steve doesn’t answer when Bucky grabs the phone and calls.  
  
Memories. They hurt. Everything hurts. Doesn’t matter.  
  
Steve matters. That’s true.  
  
  
 _then_  
  
It’s a sticky humid summer night, drowning in heat, drenched in sweat-trails and smothered breaths. Tendrils of creeping viscosity. Wavering lines practically visible in the air, like a bad cartoon.  
  
Bucky’s been sitting on the floor by Steve’s bed for hours. Days, maybe. Listening to the rattle and rasp. Air sucked into Steve’s lungs. Cloying and thick.  
  
Steve’s been sleeping fitfully, a little easier with the fall of night, though not much. The open windows try their best to help—they admire Steve’s scrappy heart just as much as Bucky does—but all they’ve got to offer’s more heat.  
  
He thinks maybe Steve’s doing better than yesterday, and then he thinks maybe he’s imagining that, and he wants to cry but he’s done that already and his eyes and chest feel hollowed out and wrung dry.  
  
He wants to apologize to Steve’s mother for everything. He’s done the best he can to take care of her son. Not that Steve’d ever love that phrasing, being taken care of.  
  
He wonders whether she’ll forgive him, looking down from up in Heaven, surrounded by the angels all good and white and shining. Probably not. He wouldn’t. It’s a stupid damn simple summer cold. Settled into Steve’s chest. Making itself at home.  
  
He’s not a nurse. He doesn’t have the money for a doctor. He doesn’t know what to do.  
  
When he closes his eyes the Sight spurts and struggles and simmers, unreliable the way his gift’s forever been. Glimpses. Small stuff. He honestly can’t tell whether Steve’s going to live or die. And that’s a kick to the gut with a steel-toed boot, because he’s normally best at Steve, anything and everything to do with Steve, always.  
  
He tries trickling water into Steve’s lax mouth. Steve wakes up enough to swallow, then coughs.  
  
Bucky says, “Hey, pal, ’bout time you got up, I’m bored, you’re boring me here, Stevie, can I tell you about this new issue of _Astounding_ I picked up, well, not new but they’re getting in the new ones tomorrow and Jimmy said I could take an old issue if I wanted, and there’s this story about time and a predestination paradox and—”  
  
Steve, being the beautiful defiant lion’s-heart that Steve is, makes a fairly rude gesture his direction and croaks, “Predestination’s stupid.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, we make our own future and all the Seers out there’ll be out of business tomorrow. Stop tryin’ to talk.” Steve knows as well as he does that the Sight doesn’t work like that. It’s a multiplicity of futures, branching, some sharper than others, some closer, some clearly tied to the past, some cut loose. They’ve both heard radio serials, spent nickels and dimes on crackling films, watched heroes display thrilling insight to thwart evildoers in the nick of time.  
  
Steve doesn’t know about him. Nothing to know. Nothing they can rely on. All he’s really got’s the present and he can’t stand a present in which Steve looks at him with disappointment; he can’t ever be one of those grand psychic superheroes, and maybe it makes him selfish, maybe it makes him a coward, but he’d rather live with the secret than watch excitement fade into disillusionment in Steve’s bright gaze.  
  
Steve closes his eyes, drifting. Bucky’s heart clenches. The heat burns his skin, and prickles behind his eyes.  
  
There are other things that Steve doesn’t know. That Steve will never, ever know.  
  
Bucky’s been lying to himself for two days now. His Sight’s been quiet, ashamed the way he’s ashamed, except he’s not, not really. He made a choice. He did See two possible futures.  
  
He’s not certain Steve’s going to live, no, but he’s pretty sure. He’d looked at two crooked knotted paths laid out for the stepping-onto, one on which he did earn the money for Steve’s medications and one on which he didn’t, and neither was a guarantee, he understood, but one had better odds than the other.  
  
He’d been standing outside Jimmy’s newsstand shaking under the brilliant sunlight two days before, pulp magazine crushed in nerveless fingers. And the wide-shouldered dark-haired sharp-dressed man who’d shown up in dreams and looked him up and down then had stepped up beside him, casual as anything, and looked him up and down in real life too.  
  
He’s not ashamed. He’s not anything. No room for that. He just wishes he knew it’d been for something. He just wishes he could be sure. He just needs Steve to live.  
  
(Later, far later, they will kiss each other under gently falling snowflakes on an Alpine mountainside, and behind a tree with the bark rough on Bucky’s back, and in a narrow borrowed cot in a war-torn French village. Bucky will flinch for only a moment when Steve tells him he’s beautiful; Steve will think it’s because of more recent memories, Zola’s laboratories and pain, and will cup his face in both big kind hands and promise him it’s okay. And Bucky will nod, because this is Steve and Steve’s newly wide shoulders and Steve’s brave compassionate eyes, and so it is okay, they’re okay, and they make love like the first-ever sunrise of the universe.)  
  
One hour later, two hours, three, Steve’s fever breaks. Steve opens confused blue eyes and focuses right on him, and Bucky says, voice cracking, “Steve—” and leans forward and kisses him.  
  
It’s all wrong and it’s all right. He’s never Seen this moment, much as he’s imagined it. He’s not thinking anything. Only feeling. Steve’s alive and looking at him and Bucky’s drowning in the need to kiss him.  
  
He’s not the brave one. Steve is. This isn’t brave. This is like breathing. He’ll die otherwise.  
  
Steve’s lips are dry and startled and then less startled and surprisingly enthusiastic if unpracticed and then also wet and kind of salty, because Bucky’s crying.  
  
Steve twines a weak hand into his hair. Bucky swipes a hand across his eyes. Doesn’t apologize.  
  
“So,” Steve husks out, voice a worn scrape from abused lungs, “ ’m I dead?”  
  
“Hell no,” Bucky says, other hand resting on Steve’s left wrist, where he’d just leaned in to check that pulse a minute before. His own is skyrocketing.  
  
“Huh,” Steve says, way too smug for someone flat on his back and barely breathing. “Pretty sure I just kissed an angel.”  
  
Bucky gets out something like, “—Goddamn terrible line, punk—” before Steve’s kissing him again.  
  
(Even later, the first time they kiss—the second first time, the first time that Bucky can recall with any solidity though the rest’ve continued coming back in slow-sidling shreds—it’s once again Bucky who moves first. Steve can’t or won’t, too generous to push, making no demands of the man who’s stumbled clumsily out of nowhere good and into his home and his life. Bucky makes sunny-side-up eggs for breakfast because he vaguely remembers doing that and climbs into Steve’s bed because that feels right, and Steve’s eyes say they want to cry but he’s holding it all inside.  
  
On the first evening of the second week, Steve’s looking at him the way Steve can’t seem to help looking at him, a mix of awe and adoration and wistfulness and determination and grief and hope, and that little muscle along Steve’s jaw ticks the way it does when the emotions’re too deep to show. So Bucky sighs and gets up from the bed and comes over to the bathroom doorway and asks, because asking’s important, “Can I kiss you?”  
  
Steve’s mouth falls open. Bucky says, “That a yes? ’Cause I’m thinkin’ I want to try,” and Steve nods, wordless and flushed.  
  
Steve tastes like toothpaste and astonishment and familiar heat, and that’s the first time Bucky thinks the word _home_.)  
  
In that first glorious moment, in their sunbaked creaking Brooklyn world for two, Steve kissing him is everything Bucky’s ever wanted. More than. He’d only begged the universe to let Steve stay alive. And the dwindling aches in the newly strange spaces of his own body don’t matter, not important, not in the grand epic scheme of everything; even that can be sweet if he thinks about it, because he made the right choice, he picked the right path to set his feet on, he did this for Steve.  
  
He did this right, Saw a future and made it happen. And somehow he’s getting rewarded. He’s not going to argue. Just going to hold on with both hands while the gift’s being offered. As long as he can.  
  
  
 _now_  
  
He’s finished strapping grenades into the appropriate places. He looks over at Sam. Who says, “I’m not gonna ask you again if you’re sure, but I am gonna ask you about the advisability of calling for backup.”  
  
“Fury doesn’t trust me.”  
  
Sam cocks an eyebrow.  
  
“He doesn’t trust my Eyes,” Bucky amends, picking up a machine gun, deciding against the weight. The autumn sun burns low and merciless through the window. He likes the sensation of the rays on his cheek. “He thinks Hydra fucked too much with my brain to ever be sure it’s not some sort of trap.”  
  
“He right about that?”  
  
“Yes. Got us a ride?”  
  
“I called Stark. Figured you didn’t want to go official. He’s sending a jet. He’s busy. On the moon.”  
  
The moonbase is very much a work in progress. Tony Stark, from what Bucky’s heard from Steve, treats it like a personal engineering-project playground. Nick Fury’s apparently convinced that someday Stark’s going to blow them all up with a badly-aimed laser. Steve’s opinion on this had been, “well, he’s probably not wrong.”  
  
“Two minutes,” Sam adds, checking his watch. “Any idea what we might expect?”  
  
“Some sort of trap.”  
  
“Okay, thanks for that.”  
  
“No, I mean…” Bucky yanks his hair back into a loose bun. He can’t bring himself to cut it any shorter—one of those oddly-shaped triggering annoyances, reminders of the insidiously mundane nature of control—but he can get it out of his face. “I don’t know. Electronics. An old computer system. Wanting—input, I think. Zola. But he’s dead.”  
  
“A dead guy plus computers. So we’re talking, what, cyborg zombies?”  
  
“I don’t know!” He glares at the rug. It’s busy cleaning itself. Tidying up after his weakness. “I’m not as good in the field as I was. The more we tip probabilities in our favor…the more I try to fuck up whatever Hydra’s got planned…”  
  
“So you can puke on people,” Sam observes. “Deadly weapon.”  
  
Bucky scowls. The Winter Soldier part of his head points out that it’s not _not_ true, as a last resort. “I can still shoot. I can still shoot _you_. We need to move _now_.”  
  
“About a minute. We should get up to your roof. Something new?”  
  
“I’m feeling better.”  
  
“Shit.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t say the _my sentiments exactly_. Unnecessary words again. Anyway, his expression’ll shout it.  
  
He slams one extra throwing knife into an arm holster, and they run out the door and up the stairs and to the hovering transport that’ll carry them to Steve.


	4. Steve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And, months later, I figured out how it ends! *whew* Thanks for putting up with me, guys.
> 
> This chapter is especially for [TurtleTotem](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem), for all the cheerleading. <333

_ now _   
  
Steve’s locked in a lab. This is not a good situation to be in, particularly not with the army of half-finished robot bodies turning sightless eyes toward him from their construction cubicles.   
  
He hadn’t meant to get locked in the lab. The doors’d slid shut and clicked, and he’d spun around. Too late.   
  
Evidently the locks work. Evidently the whole fucking place still works, decades later, dust and all. Buried miles below his old training grounds, a perfect cover—who’d attempt disturbing such a piece of history?—and apparently evil. The robots of doom’re kind of a giveaway there.   
  
He glares at the computer banks. They don’t have eyes either, but the green glowing text on the old-fashioned monitor—and yes, Steve knows they’re old-fashioned; Steve has never experienced the nineteen-eighties but he does own a thoroughly modern Stark-branded phone and tablet these days, thanks—says HA HA HA in its best supervillain tone.    
  
“You didn’t win,” he says to it. He can probably break out of the lab. He’s mentally judging: shield versus blast doors. He’d give himself a slight edge, mostly out of sheer anger. His comm’s been dead since he went into the tunnels. Bucky—   
  
He can’t think about Bucky now. He does anyway. Bucky alone, Bucky having a vision or a panic attack or a flashback, Bucky trying to call him and getting no answer—   
  
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU snipes the computer. The programming. Whatever Zola’s left in there. Steve thinks of Bucky again, thinks of robot bodies being painstakingly assembled and disassembled by dispassionate hands, thinks of a long-ago experimental table and his own hands yanking open constricting straps. Zola’s moved on from flesh to electronics, but Steve’s still seeing red.   
  
“I’m the one who’s here,” he says, “so I’m thinking it’s kind of about me,” and throws the shield at the first half-built half-human-looking wire-and-metal thing. They’re eerie, uncanny, grotesque in a way that sends shudders along Steve’s artist’s spine: a creation that should’ve been celebratory and sculptural, twisted here into parodies of human shapes with electronic guts spilling out. Obscene. At least they _are_ unfinished; Bucky Saw this soon enough to send him in.   
  
Bucky. His gut twists.   
  
And the robot catches the shield.    
  
Steve freezes for a second. Pure shock.    
  
And then his brain catches up with his body’s instincts mid-motion, diving forward, grabbing—stupid, stupid, assuming they’d be inactive, of _course_ they’re active, of course they’ve got defenses—   
  
The one he’d arbitrarily flung the shield at isn’t mobile. No legs yet. Okay. He dodges flailing metal-skeleton arms under ghostly electronic-green light. Snatches back the shield, grabs a head, twists. Pop. Comes right off. That works.   
  
He turns. The computer now says YOU ARE INCIDENTAL, and then, HOWEVER WE CAN MAKE USE OF YOUR TACTICAL EXPERIENCE, and a few mechanical arms wave needles and pliers menacingly, making the idea obvious if implausible: the dead and computerized mad scientist wants to suck his brain out and feed it to the robot army.   
  
“Not gonna happen.” Robot number two goes down easy with a kick to the neck. Only a thousand more to go. He can do this all day.   
  
He thinks of Bucky again. Of Bucky and needles and a mind fractured apart by cruel hands. This gets him through the next ten robots. Powered by rage and frustrated helplessness and guilt and love.   
  
WE EXPECTED YOU WOULD ARRIVE, sasses the computer. YOUR EYES BELONG TO US.   
  
This means Bucky. The Sight to Steve’s Shield. Steve’s hands clench around a robot leg. “He doesn’t belong to anyone. And that damn well includes you.”   
  
HE IS FUNCTIONING POORLY. YOU ARE EARLIER THAN ANTICIPATED. ALTERING THE PLAN. THIS IS AN AGGRAVATION.   
  
“Yeah, and my old CO had better insults, too.” Steve’s lost count of how many robots now. Damn computer, interrupting. Bucky’s waiting for him.    
  
He pauses, thoughtfully. Turns to the bank of malevolently humming computer cores. They’re splashed with the same envious shade of green: corpse-light, preserved in ones and zeros.   
  
IT WON’T WORK, says the program. OTHER INSTALLATIONS. OTHER BACKUPS. YOU WILL NEVER FIND THEM ALL.   
  
“Found this one.” With Bucky, because of Bucky.   
  
A pause, a whir or two. Processing. Steve uses the gap in discussion to dispose of a few more robots. They clatter and groan electronically and die.   
  
YOU MAY BE MORE TROUBLE THAN YOU ARE WORTH. IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED.   
  
“Heard that one before, too.” But that’s a problem, because when a computer program decides on something, it takes action, and that’s a hissing sound and an odd taste to the air—   
  
Steve runs for the locked door. The computer, smugly, informs him that he has TWO MINUTES TO LIVE.   
  
No. No no no. Not like this, not here and now, not when he’s got someone he wants to come home for and to—not when he’s finally able to kiss Bucky in the morning sunshine and taste terrible pumpkin-spice coffee on beloved lips—   
  
The door doesn’t give. Steve’s lungs burn. Poison. Eating away at nerve endings and flesh. Doesn’t affect the robots, who get on with building themselves, calmly plotting world domination as if Steve’s not even there.   
  
He coughs. Can’t breathe. Horrifying memories, interspersed with present desperation: himself lying in bed, choking on each inhale. Bucky’s face, pale and younger and scared. Chicken broth and a hand in his.    
  
No. He’s here and he’s alive and the world’s in painful imperfect brilliant color because Bucky’s here too, the two of them, and it’s going to _still_ be the two of them, always and forever, no end in sight to _that_ line—   
  
He hits the ground. Dizzy. Vision swirling black.   
  
Bucky, he tries to say. Bucky, I’m sorry, I know you’d be here yelling at me about backup and all the stupid while you’d be saving my ass from one more headfirst run at the villains of the world, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I think I’m hallucinating you now, that can’t be you, you’re at home and safe and wrapped up in blankets and that can’t be—   
  
It isn’t. It’s a robot. Looms up through the fog of Steve’s vision and grins mute and sinister at him. Closer to complete than the rest, and mobile enough to come and help its creator finish him off.   
  
Steve props himself up on the shield. It offers steadying heroic support. The robot comes nearer. Steve thinks briefly of Bucky making pancakes, Bucky with whipped cream on his nose, Bucky trembling with unvoiced nightmares and summoning up the strength to find words and shape them into world-saving missions.    
  
Steve grits his teeth. Leans on the shield. Waits for metal arms to descend.   
  
  
_ then _   
  
Steve doesn’t know what to do. Bucky’s here. Bucky’s here at his door. Bucky, three weeks after pulling Steve out of a watery grave and then vanishing like—Steve swallows anguish—a ghost. Bucky’s come to him and knocked on his door, just once, and stood there waiting while Steve got up and crossed the room and opened that door and found his heart on the other side.   
  
Bucky’s now sitting on the sofa and watching Steve, not speaking. Steve suspects he’s only sitting on the sofa because Steve’d said, after the first deluge of staggering shock, “Come in, Buck—sit down—”   
  
Bucky’s pale under his beard-stubble and long hair. He looks like a dream, like a nightmare of a dream, shattered and reassembled into a sleeker deadlier well-honed version of a familiar shape. He moves in a way that suggests he’s still healing; Steve himself is, at least the odds and ends of broken pieces, so it’s not a surprise that Bucky would be. Steve wants to ask. Steve wants to ask everything. Steve is afraid.   
  
He comes over and sits down on the sofa, not touching. Bucky doesn’t physically flinch, but there’s something in his eyes, and it’s something that breaks Steve’s heart into more pieces than he’d ever thought possible.   
  
He says, “You—God, Bucky,” and then tries again. “I was—we were looking for you, we—I don’t know what to— _Bucky._ ” No words. No syllables. Inadequate. This’s too big to be contained or defined.   
  
“Steve,” Bucky says. “Steve Rogers.”   
  
“…yeah? That’s. Me. Yeah, Buck, you know me.”   
  
Bucky very nearly smiles. “I don’t.”   
  
Steve can’t talk, impaled by agony.   
  
Bucky looks away, at the window. The day’s grey and storm-streaked. Rivulets and rivers of rain like tears. “He did. Bucky Barnes.”   
  
“That…you…” Steve looks at Bucky’s face, at the face of the man he’s loved since before he knew what love was, and finishes brokenly, “You found me.”   
  
“I Saw you.” Bucky sighs. “I don’t know how many—I Saw you too many times. They took it away every time. But, well. Psychic. You kept coming back.”   
  
(Later that night, Steve will find an old memory persistently resurfacing—Bucky’s voice, exhausted and beloved, saying _always did See you better than anything else_ —and he will scream into his fists and a balled-up pillow. Bucky will hear him regardless, and will come to stand in Steve’s bedroom doorway like an uncertain phantom reliving missions of its past. Eventually Bucky will come in and sit beside him when Steve has nightmares, though not that first night, not yet. Eventually Bucky will slip into their shared bed and look up with a smile, but not that first night. Not then.)   
  
“Yeah,” Steve says on that first afternoon, shaking, shaken to the core, “I sort of do that, stubborn as hell, guess even your mental visions of me are… You saved me. Do you—do you remember…?”   
  
“No one’s left to take that piece.” Bucky’s watching the rain as if that’s easier than Steve’s face. “I Saw a world without you. And one with you. And no one could give me a directive, and I—I don’t know what I chose. You.”   
  
“You chose me,” Steve whispers.   
  
“Did I choose right?” Bucky asks the rain. Fingertips—metal ones—stir, restless, and catch storm-glints. “I didn’t have time. I had to decide.” With a fleeting glance back: “I thought you might know. If it was right. Or wrong.”   
  
“Well,” Steve gets out through his closed-up throat and swimming eyes, “I’m alive, so I’m gonna say yes…”   
  
This time Bucky honestly does smile, cynical and knife-bitter but real. “Bias might be a problem, under the circumstances. Non-objective input.”   
  
“Hey,” Steve says, indignant and balancing on an ice-sheet of precious normality, “ _you_ came to _me,_ y’know. Or…was that…sort of a joke? That was a joke. Oh God, Bucky.”   
  
“Was it?”   
  
Steve narrows eyes. “Was _that?”_   
  
“I don’t know.” Bucky doesn’t shrug. No extraneous motion. The rain shivers and sings, complicated and mournful. “They took those emotions away. I don’t feel things the way I—the way I think I used to. I can’t remember. It’s backwards now.”   
  
(Steve thinks he understands what this means. He does not. He will learn. He will learn the way that Hydra took Bucky’s brain and burned out and altered certain pathways. Hydra wanted Bucky to feel pleasure when they were pleased, and the opposite when they were not. Bucky can heal to a certain extent, Bucky has a form of Steve’s own serum and that recuperative power—and Steve would give it all, would pour it from his veins into Bucky’s if it’d make a jot of difference—and Bucky even a month after coming to Steve will have taken miraculous steps in the direction of recovery.    
  
But healing is not the same as never having been wounded. Of course they both know that; but they will start to truly _know._   
  
However, this is also true: if they are not who they were, they are the ones choosing this here and now.)   
  
Then, because he doesn’t yet understand, he says, “I get that, about feeling—backwards, this time, this century, everything—hell, Buck, _I_ don’t feel things like I used to,” and then he stops because that’s him pouring his soul out to Bucky because that’s how they are, except they’re not.    
  
But maybe he’s said the right thing, maybe without understanding he got it somehow. Bucky gazes at him with startled concern, and then startlement _at_ the concern, and then says, “I think I don’t like this.”   
  
“…this…you don’t…you don’t want to _go_ —” Steve fights back panic and fear and the need to clutch at him, to keep him from disappearing like raindrops under the relentless pressure of oncoming sun. “You can go. If you don’t want to be here. I’m not trying to—you’re not a prisoner. And I’m not giving you orders. But I’d like it if you would stay. Or, um, come back. If you want.”   
  
“What?” Bucky says, and actually looks head-on at him this time. “No. I meant the having emotions part. I don’t like that seeing you hurt makes me hurt. Hearing you say that hurt. It’s a vulnerability.” He sounds fairly disgruntled about this.   
  
Steve opens his mouth, though he’s unsure what he’s going to try to say.   
  
Bucky asks, before he can say anything, “Did I love you?”   
  
Steve closes his mouth. I don’t know. I think you did. I loved you. I love you. There was never anyone else like you. There was Peggy who looked at me like you did sometimes, like you both thought I hung the moon, and you were the only two who ever saw me, and she was as much support as anyone could be when I thought you were gone. You and I never named it, whatever we were. We were us. And then you died, and I’d never said it and I’d never found out whether you’d’ve said it in return.   
  
“I think maybe you did,” he says at last. “I don’t know. We never—we never said. But I did. Love you. And you smiled at me like maybe you were just waiting for me to figure it out. But I don’t know for sure. I’m sorry.”   
  
Bucky looks down, at Steve’s floor. Steve can’t tell if that’s the answer he’d hoped for, or not even close, or anyplace in between. “…oh. Thank you. Is that the right response?”   
  
“Is that— For what?”   
  
“For you being honest,” Bucky tells the floorboards.    
  
“I promise,” Steve says, thinking about all the lies, all the Hydra warping, all the pain, “that I’ll tell you the truth. If I know it. I’ll tell you if I don’t, and I’ll tell you if there’s something that—that might not be a thing you want to know yet. I won’t lie to you.”   
  
The silence gets filled up by rain, not in a bad way.   
  
“Maybe I don’t _dis_ like this,” Bucky says. “Maybe that thing your eyes are doing makes me want to smile.”   
  
“My eyes don’t do a _thing,”_ Steve says. “What thing? Do we need to work on your vocabulary? Nouns?”   
  
“I speak eight languages, and don’t make the person with no reliable memory try to name emotions.” Bucky isn’t grinning, but sounds like he might someday remember how. “Hopeful thing. Excited thing. Puppy thing.”   
  
“Puppy isn’t an emotion,” Steve points out, and inches a hairsbreadth closer on his sofa. The rain holds its breath. “Eight, huh?”   
  
“Eight that I…remember.” Bucky’s eyes dance, hesitant as first jokes made on the beginnings of fairytale glass bridges over the dark. “I could teach you. If I’m going to stay.”   
  
“Yeah,” Steve says, and their fingertips brush, pinky fingers like an oath where they’re lying over the cushions of the couch. “I’d like that.”   
  
  
_ now _   
  
Steve’s thinking of Bucky, and Steve’s quite possibly going to die this time, and Steve hates that idea with every angry fiber of his being. He can’t breathe too well, poison nibbling like vicious singleminded fire-ants through his lungs. His healing factor’s trying to compensate, but it’s having a tough time, what with the lack of non-lethal air and the giant robot arm punching him in the face. Wires trail over his skin.   
  
Bucky, he wants to say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I couldn’t answer, I know you tried to call because of course you’d know that I was in trouble, and I know I didn’t answer, and you’re gonna have to go on now, you’re gonna be strong and safe and amazing because you already are, because I don’t think I can do this if you’re not, because I have to believe you’ll be all right, because without you I fly planes into the Arctic and I know that but maybe you’ll do better without me, I know you will, I love every version of you I’ve ever known.   
  
Bucky, he wants to say, I love you.   
  
He tastes blood. The lights go out.   
  
That’s it, then. Death, in the darkness. Blessed hush.   
  
Except—   
  
Except it’s not a hush. Except metal’s screeching through the air and a black-clad fuzzy figure’s moving in the space where a blast door used to be and a whistle screams past Steve’s face and the attacking robot falls over with a knife shorting out the circuitry in its skull.   
  
Sam, Steve thinks blurrily; of course, okay, Bucky must’ve sent Sam after him, that makes some kind of sense, but how’d Sam rip apart a metal door with his bare hands—?   
  
“Steve,” Bucky says, and Steve rasps, “Am I dead?”   
  
“Not yet.” Bucky’s kneeling in front of him, hands checking him over, touching his face, his shoulders. Bucky’s wearing a portable air-filtration mask; he pulls it off and shoves it onto Steve’s face. Steve breathes, because he needs breath to argue—Bucky needs to breathe too, dammit—and stares drunkenly.    
  
Bucky’s dressed in all-black tactical gear, swordblade-slim and obsidian-sharp. His hair’s tied up in a messy bun that’s secured with what’re either very deadly chopsticks or very tiny knives. His face is a little too white, cheekbones too pronounced, like he’s run through hell to get here and carries the memories on his skin. He’s smiling, lopsided and wry. “Can’t leave you alone for one damn second, Stevie…”   
  
“Bucky,” Steve’s mouth says, on autopilot.   
  
“Can you get up? Come on—easy, lean on me—” Two other robots converge from the shadows. Bucky steadies Steve with one hand and shoots with the other, sniper-cool. Steve takes this in, coughs on a gulp of filtered oxygen, and then grabs the damn shield and does his part to help.    
  
He needs to ask. Needs to know. He’s tangled up between realization and words. Caught in disbelief. Snarled in shock. Maybe he really is dead, gone just like that in Zola’s underground robot-army lair. Makes as much sense as anything else, and hey, this could be heaven: Bucky fighting right here alongside him, running out of bullets, punching an overly enthusiastic armless lurching robot in its nonexistent face.   
  
Bucky stops to cough. A strand of his hair slides loose. Steve yanks the mask off. “Here!”   
  
“Keep it, ’m fine!”   
  
“Your turn!” They’re just about to the exit and the hole Bucky’s conveniently ripped in the door. Steve yells, while Bucky’s getting his share of life-giving oxygen, “And I love you!”   
  
Bucky grins, sudden and free and wide. Throws the mask back at him. “Love you too!”   
  
“How the hell are you—” Steve kicks a scuttling robotic arm out of the way. Smoke and battle detritus in the air. He has to stop there, because they’re running, but he waves a hand. Bucky’ll get the idea.   
  
“—here?” Bucky stops to pitch a grenade back at the computer banks and their no-longer-smug green letters. These explode with a muffled but satisfying _whump._   
  
They’ve got zero seconds to spare, time to start sprinting for an exit, but Steve grabs his shoulder anyway. The air’s less toxic out here, though rapidly filling with ominous flame. They gaze at each other in the red-orange underground flicker.   
  
Bucky says, “Hey, you know the neat thing about Sam? He’s an empath, Steve.”   
  
Steve knows. That’s part of what makes Sam so good with veterans; it’s not a strong gift, and it’s definitely not most of the reasons Sam’s an exceptional counselor and support beacon, but it’s certainly damn helpful when—    
  
The penny, or in this case a section of tunnel wall, drops.   
  
“We should be running now,” Bucky announces. “Also, _yes,_ I’m leaning on him. He’s up there waiting. Backup. It’s all emotion anyway, in my head. Too much damn emotion. Move!”   
  
Steve grabs Bucky’s hand. They sprint for the exit hatch he remembers coming down. “Is that—”   
  
“A healthy long-term coping mechanism? _Hell_ no, Steve—” Bucky dodges hurtling debris. Graceful balletic motions. Muscle memory. Steve’s body decides it’s not too exhausted after all, despite multiple near-death experiences, to appreciate this sight, and gets incredibly turned on.   
  
“Then if you—”   
  
“Got you out of here, didn’t we?” Bucky’s somehow arranged them so that Steve’s first up the ladder. “But the thing is—” A duck, a punch of metal arm through falling wall, breaking it into rubble before it can land. “—it’s a mission, right? Saving your reckless ass!”   
  
“A _mission_ —”   
  
Bucky vaults onto the ladder below him as the tunnel floor gives way. Calls up, “No room for weaknesses during missions!”   
  
Steve twists around. “Is that in your head or—”   
  
“They said it,” Bucky admits, and _they_ means Hydra as always, “but this one’s _my_ mission, I chose you, I said, do you ever _listen_ to me, Steve, seriously,” and then the whole underground system implodes.   
  
They barely make it out, even with super-soldier reflexes. They stumble out of the crater and collapse, choking on dust and poison gas. The earth creaks dourly for a minute or two before settling down into dusty cracked quiescence. Steve looks at Bucky; Bucky looks at Steve.   
  
Late-afternoon sunlight sparkles incongruously, gold and glorious, twinkling off Bucky’s arm and white clouds and the glint of a jet hovering a few yards away. Sam Wilson’s voice booms out, “Havin’ a nice nap, or can we go now, and also you owe me so much for this, I just threw up like five times in Stark’s jet’s toilet, though on second thought I can say I threw up in Stark’s jet’s toilet, so maybe we’re even.”   
  
Bucky, weakly, lifts a hand and waves an extraordinarily obscene gesture that way. Sam laughs.   
  
Steve says, panting, airless for so many reasons, “I always listen to you, I buy you pumpkin-spice lattes and special-order your coffee creamer out of season and you said you love me and you punched a robot in the face.”   
  
“Yep,” Bucky drawls, lying in the dirt beside him, tattered and smudged and smiling at the sky. “Only the best for my best guy. We’re gonna work on it. Me and Sam. Can’t lean on him forever. Think I can work something else out, though, once we convince my head I’m maybe not _completely_ useless. Might not ever be great in the field. Might be good enough to cover your back. Worked today. I can remember that.”   
  
“Come here,” Steve pleads, “it did work, it did, you fuckin’ did, come with me and fight _all_ the evil masterminds, I love you,” and pulls Bucky over on top of him without thinking twice. They end up nose to nose, Bucky’s body sprawled heavy and warm across his, haphazard and heavily armed and dust-covered and triumphant.    
  
And Steve thinks of hunting down Zola’s other installations, of taking those out too, because they’ll need to, because there’s always a next mission, because the world’s never done needing to be saved. And he thinks of doing that saving with Bucky beside him, guarding his back; maybe they’ll need to learn and relearn how to fit together, how to balance Sight and scars and strength, how to redefine Bucky’s sense of mission success—which Bucky seems to be most of the way to figuring out okay on his own, judging from the how and why he’s here—and how to compensate without shame.    
  
But that’s not new: they’ve always been learning. Nothing’s broken. Nothing about them.   
  
And Bucky’s looking down at him, chin propped on a hand on Steve’s chest, a stray electrical burn through one eyebrow, and smiling like maybe they can see, or See, a shining expanse of heroic future.    
  
“I couldn’t not do _something,_ ” Bucky breathes. Steve says, “Yeah, I know that feeling,” and kisses him in the sunlight beside the crater of the past, while above them Sam makes exaggerated cheering noises and lowers the jet’s boarding ramp to a few beckoning feet away.


End file.
